How checking email less often makes you less stressed
Email is the bane of the new way to work’s existence. So necessary but—and this is coming from a team that sends out a daily email—so much stress!
New research from the University of British Columbia reveals that you can reduce your email stress by checking less often. Sounds easy, but in practice it’s hard for those of us conditioned to respond to every ‘ding!’, or, worse, whose coworkers stop by a minute after sending an email to discuss what they’ve sent.
“Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often,” says Kostadin Kushlev, the study’s lead author. “Most participants in our study found it quite difficult to check their email only a few times a day,”he says, “This is what makes our obvious-in-hindsight findings so striking: People find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress.“
He also notes that employees may need their organization’s buy-in, as they may help reduce employee stress by encouraging workers to check email in chunks rather than constantly responding to messages.